An angel-faced 5-year- old girl choked to death on a single peppermint candy in The Bronx as she rushed up a flight of stairs to see her mother, cops said yesterday.

Jocelys Santiago had been picked up at school on Tuesday afternoon by her older sister, who then dropped her off at their mother’s workplace, a Salvation Army day-care center on East 152nd Street.

“She went running up the stairs with candy in her mouth and that’s when she choked,” said Cliff Marshall, a spokesman for the Salvation Army.

Marshall said frantic day-care workers called 911 and a teacher performed the Heimlich maneuver in vain.

“Unfortunately, it was unsuccessful,” Marshall said. “This is a terrible tragedy.”

Jocelys was dead on arrival at Lincoln Hospital, police said.

Friends and family members described Jocelys’ parents, Yonkers residents José Santiago and Coralyz Cruz, as utterly devastated to have a loving, vivacious, beautiful daughter one minute only to be planning her funeral the next.

To add to the agony, Cruz had just picked up and proudly handed out school photos of her smiling, pig-tailed daughter yesterday. Now those photos are a painful reminder of the tragic loss of the girl they called “Jossie.”

“Jossie was the joy of the house,” said Desire Ortiz, the dead girl’s aunt. “Her mother is destroyed, everybody is.”

Ortiz started her next sentence – “I don’t know how we’ll . . . ” – but couldn’t finish it before succumbing to tears.

Regaining her composure, she added, “Jossie was Daddy’s little girl and Mommy’s little girl. She was the angel.”

Cruz was so enamored of her daughter that everyone, even casual acquaintances, knew all about her.

“She talked about that kid all the time,” said Malta Batista, a stylist who occasionally cut Cruz’s hair next door to the day-care center. “She loves her daughter. Every time she was in here, it was talk, talk, talk.”

Cruz worked in the day-care center, which takes in kids ranging in ages from 2 to 6. Jocelys did not attend the center, but was meeting her mother when the accident occurred. Jose Santiago works as an air-conditioner repairman.

“I don’t know how he’s going to pull through this,” said his brother, Robert Santiago. “She meant so much to him. He was so attached to her. She was such a smart kid. She loved music and playing dress-up.

“But it’s all in the hands of God,” he added.

Robert Santiago said Cruz was prescribed a tranquilizer to calm her down. “She doesn’t even want to eat,” he said.

No one in the family could say where Jocelys got the candy, but Robert Santiago described it as “those red-and-white, 5-cent kinds that you get in the drugstore.”

Jocelys was José Santiago and Coralyz Cruz’s only child. She has two grown children – the 20-year-old who picked up Jocelys from school, and an older son – from a prior relationship.

“It’s all so crazy,” said Luis Santana, a family friend. “You worry about your kids getting shot. Well, every kid loves candy – but in a second, she’s gone. You never expect candy to take your kid away.” Doctors said children under 5 should never have hard candies and no one should ever run with food in their mouths.

“It’s always a danger with young children,” said Dr. Mary Jo DiMilia, a pediatrician at Mount Sinai Hospital.

“If candy is involved, we always say that a lollipop is better because at least the kid won’t swallow it.”

Marshall said grief counselors were at the day-care center yesterday to help the children understand and deal with what had happened.